I want to thank Jonathan for his generous comments on POUND IN
PURGATORY. Like Ian Kluge, I think Jonathan misconstrues the dynamics of the
thirties from the perspective of post-war knowledge. Spielberg's film
company has produced a documentary on the Jews of Hungary, interviewing many
survivors.  In Nazi Hungary, where Jews had established a modus vivendi with
their Christian neighbours much less assimilative than had been the case in
Germany, the Jews were not molested until 1944. The survivors admit that
they had heard rumours of persecution and death camps, and had met refugees
from those atrocities, but disbelieved them. If Hungarian Jews could
disbelieve such "rumours" as late as 1943/44, surely Pound could not be
expected to believe them! Indeed, as I observe in POUND IN PURGATORY, the
Holocaust is scarcely believable even today--though, of course, I do not
doubt the facts--incredible though they are.
    Jonathan wrote:
"I do, however, think that the book shortchanges the extent to which Pound
was influenced by American ideas about money.  This may be because Leon
focuses on the post-World War I period.  But Pound was, contrary to what
Leon says, quite engaged with economics via Populism and his father's work
much, much earlier."
    I was unable to find any evidence that Pound was engaged with economics
before his encounter with Major Douglas. It is true that in the thirties,
Pound retrospectively details moments of economic insight from his childhood
and youth, but they do not appear in the record earlier. That silence
from--say 1900--to about 1930 on his passionate interest in economics and
populism suggests to me that the interest was retrospectively created. Alec
Marsh is the authority on this area, but I remain unpersuaded by his
arguments.
    It is true that Pound utters some anti-Semitic remarks in his youth and
early in his career. However, I carefully document his rejection of
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories when he first encounters them, and then his
subsequent acceptance of them after he read an article sent to him by
Zukosfky, of all people. Thus my claim is not that Pound was a saint of
universal tolerance--for he was not, he shared the racial and ethnic
prejudices of his class--, but rather that his "descent" into virulent
anti-Semitism was initiated by specific pressures and incapacities
associated with his committment to monetary reform and Fascism in the
thirties and thereafter.
    Finally, I can't refrain from commenting on Jonathan's well-meant
remark::
"As I might have predicted, this work is now essential reading for anyone
interested in the intellectual context in which Pound developed--it would
take an expert on Pound's mysticism to confront Pound's economics! "
    In fact, I have a longish section on Pound's economics in A LIGHT FROM
ELEUSIS, written a quarter century ago, which I still mostly stand by, and
two or three articles, which did not make it into THE BIRTH OF MODERNISM,
but have been out there for more than a decade. All of this work has been
almost completely ignored by subsequent writers on the subject (excepting
Alec Marsh, who was the beneficiary of a personal reminder from me).
Finally, A LIGHT FROM ELEUSIS is not concerned with Pound's mysticism, but
is a New Critical/Literary Historical study of what I then perceived to be
the Joycean/Eliotic mythological parallel, which stitched THE CANTOS
together. THE BIRTH OF MODERNISM altered that perspective in the light of
new evidence, and new perceptions, concerning the relationship of occultism
and modernism.
    Incidentally, a reissue of A LIGHT FROM ELEUSIS from Xlibris is
imminent, if anyone is interested.

Leon Surette
English Dept.
University of Western Ontario
London, Ont.
N6A 3K7